When I got to the car Deborah was tapping on the glass of the passenger-side window and the babalao was still staring straight ahead, jaw clenched, grimly pretending not to see her. Debs knocked harder; he shook his head. “Open the door,” she said in her best police-issue put-down-the-gun voice. He shook his head harder. She knocked on the window harder. “Open it!” she said.

Finally he rolled down the window. “This is nothing to do with me,” he said.

“Then what is it?” Deborah asked him.

He just shook his head. “I need to get back to work,” he said.

“Is it Palo Mayombe?” I asked him, and Debs glared at me for interrupting, but it seemed like a fair question. Palo Mayombe was a somewhat darker offshoot of Santeria, and although I knew almost nothing about it, there had been rumors of some very wicked rituals that had piqued my interest.

But the babalao shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “There’s stuff out there, you guys got no idea, and you don’t wanna know.”

“Is this one of those things?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “Might be.”

“What can you tell us about it?” Deborah demanded.

“I can’t tell you nothing ’cause I don’t know nothing,” he said.

“But I don’t like it and I don’t want anything to do with it. I got important stuff to do today—tell the cop I gotta go.” And he rolled the window up again.

“Shit,” Deborah said, and she looked at me accusingly.

“Well I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Shit,” she said again. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I am completely in the dark,” I said.

DEXTER IN THE DARK

45

“Uh-huh,” she said, and she looked entirely unconvinced, which was a little ironic. I mean, people believe me all the time when I’m being somewhat less than perfectly truthful—and yet here was my own foster flesh and blood, refusing to believe that I was, in fact, completely in the dark. Aside from the fact that the babalao seemed to be having the same reaction as the Passenger—and what should I make of that?

Before I could pursue that fascinating line of thought, I realized that Deborah was still staring at me with an exceedingly unpleasant expression on her face.

“Did you find the heads?” I asked, quite helpfully I thought. “We might get a feel for the ritual if we saw what he did to the heads.”

“No, we haven’t found the heads. I haven’t found anything except a brother who’s holding out on me.”

“Deborah, really, this permanent air of nasty suspicion is not good for your face muscles. You’ll get frown lines.”

“Maybe I’ll get a killer, too,” she said, and walked back to the two charred bodies.

Since my usefulness was apparently at an end, at least as far as my sister was concerned, there was really not a great deal more for me to do on-site. I finished up with my blood kit, taking small samples of the dried black stuff caked around the two necks, and headed back to the lab in plenty of time for a late lunch.

But alas, poor Dauntless Dexter obviously had a target painted on his back, because my troubles had barely begun. Just as I was tidying up my desk and getting ready to take part in the cheerfully homicidal rush-hour traffic, Vince Masuoka came skipping into my office. “I just talked to Manny,” he said. “He can see us tomorrow morning at ten.”

“That’s wonderful news,” I said. “The only thing that could possibly make it any better would be to know who Manny is and why he wants to see us.”

Vince actually looked a little hurt, one of the few genuine expressions I had ever seen on his face. “Manny Borque,” he said.

“The caterer.”

“The one from MTV?”

46

Tags: Jeff Lindsay Dexter Mystery
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